The Art of the Observer

Posted by Bethan Hirst - Monday, 16 Jan 2023

Share

Book review by Paul Henley, film-maker and founding director, Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester

With some fifty years of practice in Africa, Australia, Europe and India, David MacDougall is without doubt the pre-eminent ethnographic film-maker of the English-speaking world. To The Art of the Observer, he brings two additional qualities, not necessarily found in conjunction with practical experience: a profound knowledge of the documentary genre as a whole and the ability to write in an original and accessible way about his own practice.  Over the course of fifteen essay-like chapters, he draws on this rare combination to lay out the practical principles that have underlain his film-making.

This is not, however, a technical discussion: the closest he comes to a ‘nuts and bolts’ exposition is a chapter on “microstructures” of editing which serves as a sort of homage to the late great Dai Vaughan, who cut a number of MacDougall’s films. But most of the chapters consist of a more intellectual exploration, with illustrative examples mostly drawn from his own work, of how the ethnographic film-maker’s experience of their encounter with the subjects and their world can be rendered as a film that communicates the essence of that experience to an audience. Or, as Dziga Vertov might have put it, how ‘life facts’ can be turned into ‘film facts’.

While observation, practised in a low-key and participant manner, is central to MacDougall’s methodology, there is no pretence that this in any sense objective or in itself sufficient to represent the world as it really is. Instead, MacDougall proposes, if a film-maker aims to go beyond mere appearance and offer some genuine insight into the reality represented, they must be constantly constructing and reconstructing the goals and contexts of their observations in the light of their developing understanding and unfurling relationships with the subjects. Acknowledging and managing these processes is where the “art of the observer” lies. 

Whilst this is the central focus of the book, there is also a great deal more to it. Some chapters are of a more detached analytical character, including one on “how the visual makes sense”, and another in which he classifies the various possible modes of collaboration between film-maker and subjects. One chapter is in effect a report on the results of a programme to teach a group of Indian children to make films. Another describes, in very personal terms, his emotional as well as intellectual response to living in the closed community of an elite Indian boys boarding school, an experience which led him to a fundamental re-evaluation of his understanding of childhood generally.

The book concludes with three deftly narrated “war stories”. The first concerns an encounter with Robert Gardner. This serves to highlight the fundamental difference between them as film-makers. Whilst the cornerstone of MacDougall’s project has been to communicate his experience of his subjects’ experience, for Gardner this is an illusion: according to him, “Film … can’t get inside. Film stops at the skin”. The other two stories concern, respectively, MacDougall’s travails with multiple camera breakdowns while shooting The Wedding Camels with Judith MacDougall in Kenya in the 1970s, and his tortuous experience extracting his camera equipment from the Indian Customs Department in the 1980s. The moral of these two stories is that in order to be an ethnographic film-maker, just as important as the intellectual and aesthetic considerations discussed earlier in the book, or indeed technical expertise, are an inordinate degree of patience and an iron-willed perseverance.

For the experienced ethnographic film-maker as well as for the novice, The Art of the Observer will undoubtedly provide an abundance of examples and insights enabling them to reflect upon and enrich their own practice.



The art of the observer

A personal view of documentary

By David MacDougall

Find out more about the Anthropology, Creative Practice and Ethnography series.

Newsletter Sign Up

Manchester University Press
Close

Your cart is empty.

Total
Select your shipping destination to estimate postage costs

(Based on standard shipping costs)

Final cost calculated on checkout
Checkout
Promotional codes can be added on Checkout